Well, not really. But the image composited from different wavelengths captured by several space telescopes certainly looks like one. See image and story at New Scientist.
Nice.
Author Archive | Ian Robinson
Does all this new technology fill your brain up?
Mark Morford ponders this question.
The Edge annual question 2006 – What is your dangerous idea?
The Edge website asks many scientists and philosophers a question for the new year and publishes their responses. In 2005 the question was What do you believe is true even though you can’t prove it?. This generated a lot of interesting responses and arguments 🙂
The 2006 question is What is your dangerous idea? Responses are now available. Should make interesting reading. Think I’ll start with Richard Dawkins.
Telling it like it is 2
Sam Harris puts it very well in this article.
Laughing so much my head hurt
I got the complete series of the excellent BBC comedy Coupling for Christmas. This is one of the funniest shows ever. I was laughing so much earlier today watching it the back of my head hurt and I couldn’t breathe. Some of the lines that the character Jeff comes out with are unbelievable. Well worth checking out.
The Commonwealth Saga – Peter F. Hamilton
My first experience of Peter F. Hamilton’s work was the opening volume of The Nights Dawn trilogy. I was a few hundred pages into this huge space opera work when it was revealed what was happening to characters. Don’t want to outline it here as it will be a spoiler for anyone who comes to read the series later. For my part I hated the idea and didn’t finish the first volume. I was really disappointed as the book up to that point had been excellent. I recently got rid of them during a clear out.
I was in Waterstone’s in Belfast a few weeks ago and noticed a new book by Hamilton called Judas Unchained. This was billed as the second book in The Commonwealth Saga. The first book in the saga is Pandora’s Star which they also had in stock. Reading a bit of it in the store it looked really interesting. Galaxy spanning space opera. I love space opera that is huge in scope.
I’ve just finished Judas Unchained. I have to say that this has lived up to my hopes. The two books, Pandora’s Star and Judas Unchained, are really a single long book that just happens to have been published as two volumes. It’s about 1800 pages long and is huge in scope. The characters are believable, the future galactic colonisation is really well described and the aliens are probably the best I’ve read about in any fiction.
This is a keeper. I’ll be reading it again very soon just for the sheer pleasure and to pick up on anything I’ve missed first time. I can see this book, treating the two volumes as a single entity, joining the list of my favourite books.
There is a description of The Commonwealth Saga here. It has Spoilers!!
Telling it like it is
I’ve long been an advocate for calling a spade a spade when it comes to the way the fallacies spouted by most religions are demonstrably false and counter to the way the Universe actually works, as shown by the scientific method over the last 400 years. I hear people use the argument that people, especially when addressing the audience in the USA, should be less like Dawkins and more like Miller. I reject this view utterly. Watering down or sugar coating the direct conclusions that arise from discoveries of science is a recipe for disaster. We need to shout from the rooftops whenever something exposed by religions is demonstrably false.
PZ Myers has a nice piece on this very subject over at Pharyngula.org.
Worth a read
The latest Mark Morford column at SFGate.com. Well said that man! Here it is.
New Guitar
I’ve been playing a cheap Westfield acoustic guitar, that I bought to learn on, for the last few years. I decided to buy a good quality replacement now that I’m sure I’m going to continue playing. Doing research into what are good quality acoustic guitars I came across the usual suspects like Martin, Takamine etc. I also kept hearing about a make called Lowden that are made in Northern Ireland. People kept singing their praises and saying that Lowdens were brilliant guitars. Looking into it I discovered that what was the Lowden company had split, with the former company taking the name Avalon Guitars, located in Newtownards, and a new company called Lowden Guitars formed by George Lowden located in Downpatrick. There is also at least one other Northern Ireland based guitar maker with a connection to the former Lowden company. This is McIlroy Guitars located in Antrim.
I really liked the idea of getting a guitar that was actually made here in Northern Ireland. As long as it sounded okay. I wanted an acoustic with a lightly coloured wood top and without any electrics installed. I got the chance to play an Avalon guitar in a shop in Bangor a few days ago and it sounded really nice and looked good as well. But it was from an Avalon range that was made overseas. Not that this would have stopped me buying it, but I wanted to try some of the locally made ones as well.
I went to the Belfast Guitar Emporium to see what they had in stock. Wow. This is a wonderful shop. If you are are looking for a guitar of any type then this shop should be on your list of places to visit. They have loads of guitars in stock and they are very friendly and knowledgeable. At the back of the store they have a separate acoustic room with about a dozen Lowden guitars and a big couch to sit on and try them out. I spent time in there trying out the models available. Four of the guitars fitted the criteria I had. I quickly narrowed the ones I was interested in down to two. An O-32 and a S-12c. I spent quite a bit of time A/B’ing these two. They were both bloody marvelous. One of the guys from the shop said he thought the S-12c was the best Lowden he had heard. He was excellent playing it. He is certainly a better guitarist than I am 🙂 I liked the sound from the O-32 better, though it was a close call. The O-32 had a deeper sound that I really, really liked. Ironically one of the things I told the guys in the shop was that I liked a more treble sounding guitar. The O-32 changed my mind!
So after playing both for a while I settled on the O-32. I hadn’t asked the price of the two I was thinking off as I didn’t want the price to colour my choice. I wanted to make the choice based on sound and feel. It turned out that the O-32 was the cheaper of the two so that was a bonus. So I bought the O-32. Here is is:
Click picture for larger view
I really like it. It looks beautiful and has a wonderful tone. The top is Sitka Spruce and the back and sides are Indian Rosewood. The neck is Mahogany/Rose and the fingerboard is Ebony. Other woods, in addition to those listed above, like Walnut and sycamore are used for inlay and detail. There are more pictures of he guitar here. It has a wonderful wood smell too.
Hopefully this guitar will last me for the rest of my life and that that will be a very long time.
There was much rejoicing
The intelligent design proponents (or IDiots as they are known) lost big time in the court case about the teaching of ID in Dover. Happy days. The Judge didn’t just rule against them but went out of his way to show that ID is just repackaged creationism. You can read the ruling in the PDF available here. There is a good summary of responses at The Questionable Authority.